The present invention relates to an indoor unit of an air conditioner having a filter cleaning function for automatically cleaning dust adhering to a filter and, more particularly, an air conditioner in which one filter and another filter are asynchronously driven at the time of initialization of the two filters.
As described in; for instance, Patent Document 1, some of indoor units of recent air conditioners have a filter cleaning function for automatically removing dust adhering to filters.
The filter cleaning function is fulfilled by means of filters attached to a main unit cabinet so as to close air inlets and a cleaning unit for collecting dust adhering to the filters. The filters are usually caused to pass through the cleaning unit, thereby collecting the dust adhering to the filters by means of the cleaning unit.
A method for cleaning the filters includes two methods; namely, a method for moving a cleaning unit while fixing a filter and another method for moving the filters while the cleaning unit is held stationary. Under the former method, the cleaning unit is moved, and hence complicate movement and power for effecting the movement are required.
Accordingly, in many instances, the latter method for moving the filters is adopted. However, when the filters are moved, a space for reciprocal front-and-back movement of the filters is required. Hence, in Patent Document 1, the filters are withdrawn to the outside of the main unit cabinet. Moreover, in Patent Document 2, a portion of the filter is turned in the shape of the letter U, and the filter is reciprocally moved within the main unit cabinet.    [Patent Document 1] JP-A-2007-107764    [Patent Document 2] JP-A-2007-198678
However, in the air conditioner defined in Patent Document 2, the air inlets are positioned only on an upper surface side of the main unit cabinet; hence, filters are short, and the essential requirement is to arrange, on the front side of the main unit cabinet, an alternative path for executing a U-turn of a portion of the filter.
In the air conditioner in which the air inlets are formed from a front surface to an upper surface of the main unit cabinet, the filters become larger correspondingly. For this reason, even when the U-turn mechanism described in Patent Document 2 is used, bypassing the front surface of the filter is impossible.